College papers land left, right to free speech

May 01, 2001|By Eric Zorn.

College newspapers are at it again, declining to run a strongly worded ad on a hot-button issue because, you know, some ideas are just too upsetting for students to read.

Fallen liberal provocateur David Horowitz started this in February when he began trying to buy ad space in campus papers for his essay on slavery reparations: "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks Is a Bad Idea for Blacks--and Racist Too."

Forty papers refused to print the ad. And several of the 28 that did were hit with the sorts of protests that underscore a common conservative complaint that the left's devotion to free speech extends only to liberally orthodox speech.

Last week, student groups at the University of Illinois and Indiana University rallied against the Daily Illini and Indiana Daily Student after those papers ran Horowitz's ad.

More than 50 protesters gathered in the Illini Media Co. parking lot Friday and demanded the paper print an apology, according to a Daily Illini article.

Demonstrators on the Indiana campus Thursday blasted the ad as "racist material" and issued a list of demands that included diversity training for staffers at the Daily Student, according to the paper.

Neither paper is backing down, which is good news. It takes courage to challenge one's audience.

And courage, along with a devotion to the open exchange of ideas, is just what writer David Mazel suspected many conservative campus publications also lacked.

Friday in Salon, an Internet magazine, Mazel reported on a recent experiment in which he sent an aggressively pro-abortion rights ad to 11 conservative college publications. Mazel's submission, purportedly from Americans for Biblical Truth bore the headline "According to the Holy Bible, abortion is not murder."

In particular he cited Exodus 21:22, where it says that if a man injures a pregnant woman "so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no harm follows, the one who hurt her shall be fined."

Thus, Mazel concluded, scripture tells us the fetus "is a thing owned by the woman's husband--a thing whose loss, like that of any other thing, may be compensated for with money."

Is this a point to ponder, particularly in light of a legislative proposal in Washington to make killing a fetus a federal crime? Or is it, as Nora O'Callaghan, director of the Chicago Archdiocese's Respect Life Office put it, an "irritating," out-of-context citation that represents "the weakest and most flawed kind of argument from authority"?

Brew a pot of coffee, type "What the Bible says about abortion" into a good Internet search engine and you can spend the better part of a day reading chapter-and-verse polemics from both sides. You'll see Mazel is hardly the first to make his point and that it's possible for people of faith to come at the abortion question in a variety of ways.

In an e-mail interview, Mazel wrote, "My methodology was crude, as was my goal, which was basically just to be able to say, `So's your old man!'"

Which he did after only one of the 11 conservative papers accepted his ad. "Certain stipulations" blocked the way at the Bob Jones University Collegian. "Controversial content" scared off the Virginia Military Institute Cadet. "We can't run something like that that doesn't go with our beliefs," explained a representative of the Liberty University Champion.

On many conservative campuses, Mazel said, the idea of free speech "is not only not being honored, it has never been a high priority at all. ... I believe [it] should be honored across the board and that all campuses that dishonor it deserve to be ridiculed."

By phone, Horowitz said that by targeting mainly private, ideologically based institutions, Mazel had simply reinforced Horowitz's point: that mainstream college papers are nearly as narrow-minded as papers at rigid, authoritarian institutions such as Bob Jones University. Furthermore, he said, Mazel's ad, which concludes with the line "God is an abortionist," is offensive, whereas his ad, he said, is not.

So to broaden the experiment, on Monday I sent an e-mail copy of Mazel's ad to conservative publications on 11 campuses where Horowitz says he was rejected and asked if they'd run it.

The early returns at press time: 3 no, 2 yes.

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Read Mazel's article, his ad, the latest on my experiment and lots about the Horowitz caper by clicking on "extra info" at chicagotribune.com/go/zorn